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Mindfulness @work

I was at a workshop recently where the facilitator talked about Humans being descendants of the Nervous Apes, because all the Chilled Apes did not survive. He was referring to an evolutionary skill we have all developed, which is to perceive threats more acutely so that firstly we can survive and then if we can learn to deal with these threats, thrive.

And thrive we have – over the last 50 years we have made huge progress to fill our lives with conveniences and technology has played a big part in making our lives more comfortable.

But despite all this progress, we are still working harder than ever.

At work, we are driven by results and in many organisations, performances are linked to quarterly and half yearly performance targets. To achieve these results, we focus on process, optimising and streamlining the process to get the biggest bang for the buck. Our mobile devices keep us constantly connected to huge amounts of information, which adds to the feeling of pressure and time becomes the shortest of commodities. We wait for our holidays to de-stress, but there again we can’t switch off as we carry these mobile devices with us. A recent article talked about us using our mobile devices for approximately 2.5 hours in a day, and that 50% of the people surveyed claim to check their mobile devices when they wake up at night.

This way of life is creating significant health issues – the latest Time magazine article talked about 300 million people world-wide who suffer from depression. In the US approximately 12% people are taking some form of anti-depression medication on a regular basis.

Here are some other interesting facts: Did you know our Minds wander 47% of the time and that 70% of leaders regularly report not being attentive during meetings? And yet only 2% people do something to address this issue of mind wandering.

So what can we do about this?

Ariana Huffington has talked about this problem in her book called Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder. She believes we have focused too much attention on the external world of “Money and Power” as the key factors of success and have neglected the third key metric, which is our “Well-being or our Inner World”.

Since we can’t change the pace of the external world, we need to find better ways to build up our “Inner Space and Capacity” and find ways to “Pause and Reset”.

The good news is that neuroscience research has now confirmed that we can build up our emotional capacity and resilience by adopting some mindfulness practices which enables new pathways in our brain to be established, referred to as neuroplasticity.

Mindfulness exercises can help us increase our concentration and focus which can help reduce the wandering of our minds. With other simple techniques, such as attentive listening, we can build our empathy and compassion, not just to others but also to ourselves. There are other mindfulness exercises which can help us build our emotional resilience, which would make us better at handling stressful situations and relationships. In short, mindfulness helps us build up our emotional intelligence, which is the key to more effective leadership, decision making and well-being.

The other great news is that mindfulness practices have now been adapted to suit the corporate world that we executives live in, so let us take this opportunity to bring mindfulness @work and bring a greater focus to the third metric, our well-being.